How to convert your QCOW file
- Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your QCOW file.
- You'll see a preview.
- Click the "Convert file to..." button to save your file in the format you want.
Convert QCOW to another file type
The converter easily converts your QCOW file to various formats - free and online. No Windows or extra software needed.
- QCOW to VMDK
- QCOW to RAW
- QCOW to QCOW2
- QCOW to OVA
- QCOW to ISO
- QCOW to VDI
- QCOW to VHD
- QCOW to VHDX
- QCOW to IMG
- QCOW to DMG
- QCOW to HDD
- QCOW to VBOX
Convert a file to QCOW
The converter also works in reverse, so you can convert other Disk Image formats to QCOW with high quality output.
- VFD to QCOW
- DMG to QCOW
- OVA to QCOW
- IMA to QCOW
- VBOX to QCOW
- ADF to QCOW
- PVS to QCOW
- VHD to QCOW
- OVF to QCOW
- ISO to QCOW
- DSK to QCOW
- IMG to QCOW
About QCOW files
The .QCOW (QEMU Copy-On-Write) format is a legacy virtual disk image file used primarily by the QEMU processor emulator. While it allows a virtual machine to store data effectively by only writing changes relative to a backing file, it has been largely superseded by the more robust QCOW2 format. Users frequently experience issues with .QCOW files because they are effectively "dead" technology; modern virtualization platforms like VMware Workstation or Oracle VirtualBox do not natively support this specific version without conversion. Furthermore, you cannot simply double-click these files in Windows or macOS to access the files inside, creating a "black box" scenario for archiving. To make these files usable, the best path is conversion: upgrade to QCOW2 for modern QEMU/KVM features (like snapshots and encryption), convert to VMDK for compatibility with VMware products, or transform to VHD for use with Microsoft Hyper-V. For direct file extraction, converting to a RAW image is often necessary to mount the disk on a host system.
Convert.Guru analyzes your QCOW file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted QCOW2, ISO, IMG, ZIP, VMDK, RAW, OVA, VDI, VHD and VHDX files.
The QCOW Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our QCOW converter.